Second Shot

The fear was a sudden starburst rising from my belly, bunched up tight under my ribs, a bright, leaking coldness that froze my heart to the inside of my chest. A cold flame ignited at the base of my right lung.

“That’s it?” I said.

He considered for a moment. “Yup, that’s it,” he said. “That’s the message, from my boss to yours, in full.”

“So you’re nothing more than the messenger boy, is that it?”

He smiled again, almost a grin this time. “Well, it was left to my own judgment how best to deliver the message-how to give it maximum impact, you might say”

He stretched out the Beretta and touched the barrel of the gun to my left leg. It was barely a brush against the fabric of my sweatpants, but I couldn’t control a flinch that had nothing to do with the physical contact.

Almost lazily, like a caress, Reynolds used the gun to trace the indentation where the bullet had exited at the front of my thigh. I compelled myself to sit motionless, to show no response.

“I wonder what will happen,” he said softly, “if I put another round through your leg in just the same place as the last. Will it hurt more or less than the first time?”

“Your message wouldn’t get delivered,” I said with a calm that came from somewhere else, somewhere outside of me.

“No?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No,” I said, firm but matter-of-fact. “Last time, I was lucky. A millimeter or two either way and you’ll hit an artery and I’ll bleed out before the others get back.” The tightness in my chest was making it difficult to get a whole sentence out in one breath. “And if that happens, Sean Meyer will find you and kill you, if he has to go to the ends of the earth to do it.” The utter conviction in my voice didn’t have to be forced.

Reynolds sat back a moment, as if considering. “Your death would be an inconvenience we could do without,” he allowed. “But I still have to persuade you and your boss — and anyone else who’s hanging around- that letting this drop would be in all your best interests. And if I can’t shoot you-” He shrugged, regretful, slid the safety back on and put the Beretta back into its holster, “I guess I’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

I tried to brace myself, brought my arms up to cover as much of my torso as I could, but it didn’t do much good. He hit me a low relatively lightweight punch, almost experimental, somewhere around my kidney on the left side. An incendiary burst of pain exploded inwards and upwards, the shock wave buffeting through my body, robbing me of sight and breath and sanity I screamed.

And then I fainted.

A moment later, or so it seemed, I opened my eyes and found I was sprawled facedown on the sofa with a pulsating white-hot burn going on in my back that lanced straight through to my chest and pinned me there.

For a moment I thought that maybe it was all over, that Reynolds had delivered his message and gone. I should have known I wasn’t that lucky.

“You’re obviously not a party girl, Charlie,” he said, shattering that fragile hope. “Here was I hoping we’d be up all night dancing, and you pass out on me at the first sign of a little trouble.”

I lifted my head-very, very carefully-and turned it so I could see across the room. Reynolds was sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the coffee table.

“I was shot, Reynolds. What did you expect?” I said, my voice thick. I had the hollow bitter taste of bile in the back of my throat and I had to swallow it before I could speak. “I thought your orders weren’t to kill me.”

A mistake to use the word “orders,” I realized, but not until I’d already used it and it was too late to pull it back. Something even colder flashed through his eyes.

“Kill you, no,” he said, getting to his feet with that deadly smile back in place. “Nobody said anything about what else I could do to you, though.” And he reached for the fly of his jeans.

I panicked instantly, flapping like a landed fish. I tried to push myself up off the sofa, but my right arm wouldn’t support my body weight and folded under me, so I nearly rolled over the edge and fell. Reynolds grabbed hold of my shoulders and hoisted me back onto the sofa, shoving my face down hard into the cushion so now I was suffocating as well. The spike of pain was such that I barely felt him tug at the waistband of my sweatpants.

In desperation, I reached my left hand back, clawed at him. My fingers brushed against something leather and he jerked back out of reach so fast that at first I thought I might somehow have hurt him, and then I realized that by chance I’d touched the holstered Beretta.

His weight shifted. Then came the sound of something heavy dropping onto glass. He’d put the gun down over on the coffee table, only a meter or so away. It might as well have been in Diisseldorf.

While he was leaning over I bucked under him, but it was a feeble attempt with no muscle behind it and he regained his balance easily.